by J. A. Jance
Mel emerged from the bathroom wearing a short silky robe, the hem of which skimmed the bottom of her equally silky panties. She came over to where I was sitting and brushed the top of my head with a kiss as she collected my empty coffee cup from the end table at my elbow. “Refill?” she asked.
“Thanks,” I mumbled.
“What are you working on?”
I could have asked her about Richard Matthews right then, but coward that I was, I didn’t. I wasn’t ready. The idea that history might be repeating itself was too appalling.
“Dortman,” I lied.
Mel stood in front of me, with my cup in one hand and the other on her hip. “Look,” she said reprovingly. “Anthony Cosgrove has been missing and/or dead since 1980. And most of the guys on my list have been gone for months if not years. This is Sunday. Other than last night at dinner, we’ve been so caught up in work that we’ve neglected Scott and Cherisse the whole time they’ve been here. We also haven’t been very diligent about keeping tabs on Lars. How about if we give ourselves the whole day off and pay attention to people instead of cases?”
Concerned that Mel’s womanly wiles might somehow allow her to see into the workings of my computer and divine what I had been doing prior to typing in Dortman’s name, I immediately capitulated.
“Great idea,” I said, slapping shut the laptop’s lid. “It’s the weekend. Let’s forget about work for a while. It’ll do us both a world of good.”
Mel disappeared into the kitchen and returned with my replenished coffee cup, which she handed over to me. As she did so her forehead knotted into a puzzled frown. “You look upset,” she said. “Is something the matter?”
“No, nothing,” I said, probably a tad too quickly. “I’ll go shower—if you’ve left me any hot water, that is.”
The last was a joke. My condo is equipped with an instant hot water heating system that can replenish itself almost as fast as someone can use it. And Mel joked right back.
“A cold shower might be good for you now and then.” She grinned.
The shower wasn’t cold, but it could just as well have been. I stood in the powerful flow that cascaded down from a ceiling-mounted showerhead while my body was pounded with spray from a collection of wall-mounted showerheads as well. Steam may have been circling upward toward the ceiling, but I felt chilled.
Surely she wasn’t involved in the death of Richard Matthews, I told myself. Surely not. It was probably a robbery gone bad, a fatal but otherwise ordinary mugging. Or maybe Matthews got involved in the drug trade to supplement his retirement income.
But there was a part of me that held otherwise—part of me that was afraid my worst nightmare was about to happen all over again.
The easiest thing and probably the best thing would have been to come straight out and ask Mel about it right then. But cops don’t ask questions unless they have a fairly good idea of what the real answers should be. Anne Corley had lied to me with utter impunity, and I was determined not to be that stupid again. So before I asked Mel any questions I needed to find out some of the answers. To do that, I’d be operating solo. Mel may have been my partner in every sense of the word, but if she had somehow stepped onto the wrong side of the thin blue line, I was the one who would have to figure it out—and do something about it.
Standing there with the punishing water pummeling my body, I was suddenly struck by an idea. There was one other person in the world who had been betrayed by Anne Corley in much the same way I had been; one other sucker who, if I told him my suspicions, would immediately grasp all possible ramifications. After all, my friend and attorney, Ralph Ames, had been Anne Corley’s friend and attorney long before he became mine, and she had suckered him, too.
Leaving the shower running full blast, I stepped out onto the bath mat, hotfooted it into the bedroom, retrieved my cell phone, and took it back into the bathroom, where I dialed Ralph’s number.
“Where are you calling from?” Ralph asked once he was on the line. “You sound like you’re standing in the middle of a torrential downpour.”
“I am,” I said. “That’s the shower.”
“Here’s an idea,” he said. “How about if you call me back after you finish your shower.”
“Please, Ralph,” I said. “There’s a problem. Listen to me.”
And he did. I explained it all while the shower continued to roar. “So what do you want me to do?” he asked when I finished. “Try to find out whether or not the remains really do belong to Richard Matthews?”
“That would be a big help,” I said. “And what, if any, progress has been made in finding out who killed him.”
“Anything else?” Ralph asked.
One of the good things about Ralph Ames is that he doesn’t require a lot of explanation. He gets things. And then he goes to work and gets things done. And since he doesn’t necessarily have to concern himself about maintaining chains of evidence and fruit of poisoned trees and all that jazz, he has avenues of investigation that aren’t necessarily open to sworn police officers.
“Mel’s full name is Melissa Katherine Majors Soames,” I replied. “I’m pretty sure she went to Mexico sometime last November. I don’t know for sure when she went or where she traveled, but I think it was sometime before Thanksgiving.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Ralph said. “Meantime, watch yourself.”
That was another thing I appreciated about Ralph. He didn’t stand around jawing or dishing out a bunch of phony platitudes. Since I was worried, he was worried, and he would simply shut up and go to work. That meant a lot.
Mel knocked on the closed bathroom door. I was so startled it’s a miracle I didn’t drop the cell phone into the toilet. “Lars is on the phone,” she said. “Do you want to take it?”
Without saying good-bye to Ralph I pressed the call-ending button. “Tell Lars I’m in the shower. I’ll call him back when I get out.”
Still disturbed by the staggering possibilities, I was disgusted to find that my right hand shook uncontrollably. In the process of shaving I nicked my neck twice and the bottom of my ear once, and I emerged from the bathroom with tiny scraps of toilet paper stanching the flow of blood to keep it from ruining my collar.
Once I was dressed I stood for a few minutes looking at my cell phone on the bathroom’s granite countertop. Part of me wanted to have it with me at all times so I’d be able to hear from Ralph the moment he learned anything. But I didn’t want to have to take a call like that—regardless of his news—in Mel’s presence. She was a cop. She’d be too curious. She’d want to know what the call was about. She’d want to know exactly what was going on.
But I had spent a lifetime living on call. It was too late to change that now. After a wavering moment of indecision I brought the phone along with me. Leaving it behind really wasn’t an option.
Out in the living room I found Mel dressed and ready to go. “Lars was calling to double-check on who was picking him up for breakfast—Scott and Cherisse or the two of us. He also wanted to know if you thought Scott and Cherisse would mind if he brought a friend along to breakfast.”
“A friend?” I asked. “What kind of friend?”
“Her name is Iris,” Mel answered. “Iris Rassmussen. According to Lars she was a good friend of Beverly’s.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Are you telling me that we buried Beverly on Thursday and Lars wants to bring someone else along to brunch on Sunday?”
“I don’t think he meant it like that,” Mel returned. “I’m sure it’s nothing romantic.”
I wasn’t convinced. I thought about Lars’s protestations earlier in the week about how all the single ladies in Queen Anne Gardens were camped out at his front door and jockeying for position before Beverly was even cool to the touch. And now this?
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him that as far as I knew, Scott and Cherisse were supposed to pick him up,” Mel answered. “As for the rest of it, I said I was sure it would be fin
e but that you’d call him back as soon as you could.”
“It isn’t fine,” I grumbled.
“Come on,” she said. “He probably just wants to have someone along who’s his age, someone who’s on the same page he is.”
“I’ll bet Iris is on the same page, all right,” I told her. “Let’s go.”
“But I thought you were going to call him back,” Mel objected.
“Why bother?” I said. “You already told him he could bring her. He doesn’t need to hear it from me.” Even I was aware enough to see the irony of the situation. Kelly didn’t have a thing on her old man.
Mel shot me an exasperated look. “What’s the matter with you this morning? Did you get up on the wrong side of the bed, or what?”
The wrong side of the universe is more like it, I thought. “Nothing’s the matter,” I said. “What are we waiting for? We could just as well see what that randy old coot is up to.”
CHAPTER 16
Breakfast wasn’t nearly the disaster it could have been. Despite my misgivings about her, Iris Rassmussen turned out to be the life of the party. She was full of one off-color Sven and Ole joke after another, and she told them with all the verve and style of an aging stand-up comedienne. She kept all of us in stitches, me included, and that was pretty remarkable in view of the fact I wasn’t in much of a joking mood. Lars laughed along with the rest of us, and chowed down on his oyster omelet with his customary enthusiasm. Laughing seemed to do wonders for his appetite.
Iris was tuning up to deliver yet another punch line and the waitress had yet to drop off the check when my phone rang. The Fisherman’s Restaurant is low on six-tops, and I was stuck in a corner with my back to the window, which meant I couldn’t very well leave the table to take the call. I was relieved when a glance at the readout displayed an unfamiliar number. At least it wasn’t Ralph.
“Mr. Beaumont?” a woman asked. The voice wasn’t one I could place, but she sounded upset. I excused myself and made my way outside.
“Yes.”
“It’s me—DeAnn Cosgrove,” she said. “There’s someone here who needs to talk to you.”
I heard her passing the receiver to someone else. “Mr. Beaumont? I’m Detective Tim Lander of the Chelan County Sheriff ’s Department. I understand from Ms. Cosgrove here that you intended to go see Jack and Carol Lawrence in Leavenworth yesterday.”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s right, and I did go there. Why?”
“I’m investigating a double homicide,” he said. “Carol and Jack Lawrence were found shot to death in the yard outside their home early this morning. A kid delivering their Sunday paper found the bodies.”
When husbands and wives perish together, it’s usually pretty easy to fill in the blanks, and the outcome is one that would come as no surprise to “those women” gathered in their evening finery at the Sheraton. A husband or ex-husband or boyfriend or ex-boyfriend murders the woman who was once the love of his life and then turns the weapon on himself.
“Murder/suicide?” I croaked.
“No,” Lander answered. “That’s not how it looks so far, since no weapon was found at the scene. Would it be possible to meet with you this morning? I’d like to discuss the purpose of your meeting with them yesterday. I’d also like to know what the outcome was.”
Lander had made his approach in an offhand way, but I knew there was nothing casual about his invitation. Both the Lawrences were dead. Now it seemed likely I was one of the last people to see Carol Lawrence alive. In the eyes of homicide investigators, that automatically made me a person of interest, if not an outright suspect. It also meant that Detective Lander wanted to talk to me, and he wanted to talk to me now. No doubt DeAnn had mentioned that I was with the attorney general’s office. That explained why Lander’s request for an interview was couched in a way that made allowances for professional courtesy. It was incumbent on me to respond in kind.
“I didn’t meet with both of them,” I corrected. “Jack Lawrence wasn’t home at the time. I only spoke to Mrs. Lawrence, but of course I’ll be glad to meet with you. Just tell me where and when. I’m in Seattle right now. Where are you?”
“Redmond,” Lander answered. “Talking with DeAnn Cosgrove and her husband at their house.”
“I could meet you at the Special Homicide offices in Eastgate, if you like.”
“Where’s that?” Lander asked. “And how soon can you be there?”
I glanced at my watch. “Depending on traffic, half an hour to forty-five,” I said. Then I gave him Special Homicide’s street address as well as driving directions. When I returned to the restaurant, Iris Rassmussen was still holding forth. The only other person paying any attention to my phone call was Mel, who was giving me what I’ve sometimes heard my son-in-law refer to as “the stink eye.”
“What’s up?” she asked.
“Work,” I said, flagging down our harried waitress. “I’m going to have to go into the office.”
“Good,” she returned. “I’m coming along.”
I had been hoping to have a chance to confer with Ralph Ames in relative privacy, but telling Mel she wasn’t welcome to ride along would have caused an immediate uproar, especially since we had arrived at the restaurant in the same vehicle. We made our way out to the parking lot and said our good-byes to Iris and Lars and to Scott and Cherisse as well.
“What’s wrong?” Mel asked as soon as the Mercedes’s doors shut behind us.
“What makes you think something’s wrong?”
She rolled her eyes. “Something’s bothering you,” she said. “And don’t try blaming it on whoever called you just now. You were wound tight long before the call came in.”
That’s one of the most disconcerting things about Mel. I sometimes think she understands me better than I understand myself. Or that she can read my mind. But she was absolutely right—I had been wound very tight. I screwed my courage to the sticking place and tackled the issue head-on. Well, more or less head-on.
“Where did you go when you went to Mexico last fall?” I asked.
“Cancún,” she said, sounding surprised.
Cancún. Bad answer. There it was—out in the open. My heart did a flip-flop at the very sound.
“Why do you want to know about that?”
I ignored her question. “When were you there?” I asked.
“The end of October through the first week in November,” she said. “But I don’t understand. What’s this all about?”
The dates she mentioned hit me like a second blow to the gut. The end of October coincided exactly with the time when Richard Matthews had reportedly disappeared from his early-morning beachside walk. In Cancún. Having launched this disturbing conversation without waiting for any kind of confirmation from Ralph Ames, I realized there was no turning back.
“Remember your dead friend’s father?” I asked. “The one you told me about yesterday?”
“Richard Matthews, Sarah’s father?” Mel asked. “Of course I remember him. Why?”
“He disappeared in Cancún on the first of November.”
“Disappeared?” she asked.
“His body was found later. He died from a single gunshot wound.”
She chewed on that one for a while. “And you think I had something to do with what happened to him?”
“Did you?” I asked.
We were on Mercer by then, headed for I-5. “Why don’t you stop the car and let me out,” she said. “I’ll walk back to the house.”
“We need to talk about this,” I said.
“It sounds like I’m a suspect here,” she said. “Like maybe you need to read me my rights. Maybe I should have an attorney present. Or do you want to pick up my weapons and turn them over to ballistics?”
“Mel, please,” I said. “It’s not like this hasn’t happened to me before.”
“So that’s what this is all about?” Mel demanded after a pause. “It’s all about Anne Corley, isn’t it? Since she went off the rails and ki
lled somebody, you automatically assume I must have done the same thing. Is that what you think?”
Of course she had me dead to rights on that one, and the similarities between the two cases in terms of motivation and deadly results was far too close to ignore. I didn’t answer her question immediately, not aloud, and that in itself was answer enough. A glance in Mel’s direction showed me that she was sitting on the far side of the car with her arms folded across her chest. When Melissa Soames folds her arms, it is not a good sign.
“What happened to Richard Matthews?” she wanted to know.
“I’ve told you everything I know. He went for a walk on the beach on the morning of November first and never returned. His wife filed a missing person’s report right after he disappeared. His badly decomposed body was found sometime later, and an autopsy revealed he had died of what I believe was a single gunshot wound. I’m not sure whether or not a bullet was recovered.”
“I may have been in Cancún at the time he was shot,” Mel said, “but I had no idea that’s where he lived. And no matter what you think, I’m not responsible for what happened to him.” She paused briefly and then added, “When did you learn all this?”
“This morning,” I said. “I stumbled across it on the Internet while you were showering.”
“And you immediately leaped to the conclusion that since Richard Matthews was dead, I had to be the one who killed him?” Mel shook her head. “That doesn’t speak very highly for whatever it is I thought the two of us had going.”
“Mel,” I began. “It’s just…”
“Don’t bother with the apology bit,” she said. “I don’t want to hear it.”
My phone rang then, right in the middle of the I-90 bridge. The way my luck was going, there was no need to check the caller ID readout. I knew it had to be Ralph as soon as the phone rang and before I answered.
“Mel flew in and out of Cancún along with seven other women on board a private jet that belongs to someone named Anita Bowdin,” Ralph said. “They stayed at a beachfront home called Casa del Sol owned by Ms. Bowdin. They arrived on Thursday, October twenty-eighth, and returned to Seattle on Wednesday, November third.”